Word: flu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Chances are your shirt, your pants and your underwear all came from southern China, the new manufacturing center of the world. Add one more export: your flu virus. With its dense populations of people and animals trading germs back and forth, southern China has been the traditional birthplace of influenza, including the nasty strain of H5N1 bird flu that's keeping public-health officials awake at night. The viruses that evolve in a chicken in southern China's Guangdong province could eventually end up in your lungs--and that's what makes a chain-smoking, impetuous Chinese virologist named...
Guan, 43, who was born in mainland China but is chiefly based at the University of Hong Kong, is a human early-warning system in the shifting viral landscape of southern China and now southeast Asia, where bird flu has been endemic since the end of 2003. Although Beijing is traditionally secretive about disease within its borders, Guan's network of mainland Chinese contacts and his secondary position at Shantou University in Guangdong province have helped his team gather biological samples from more than 100,000 birds in the region over the past five years, more than any other scientist...
...self-confidence to rise from Jiangxi Medical College in the heartland of China, where Guan earned his M.D. at age 21, to a corner office in Hong Kong and a position as one of the most important influenza experts in the world. As we inch closer to a possible flu pandemic, Guan keeps gathering his data, doing his part to piece together the puzzle that is the avian flu. "I do this work for the whole world," he says. "For the first time, human beings have the ability to prevent a pandemic. How many lives will we save...
People give for all kinds of reasons. We give out of duty, pity, love or fear. The shrinking world crowds us closer to pain--and risk; SARS began in Asia but caught a flight to Canada and killed people there. If avian flu, now hitchhiking through Europe, migrates to Africa--where there is neither the money nor the medical infrastructure to track it, much less trap it--the already scary scenarios suddenly get even scarier. The "we're safe, it's far away" illusion has died; the sense of being stalked by a disease is now felt in rich countries...
...cost of maintaining the site is only in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, says Los Alamos executive Allen Morris. Still, he says, "we're running on vapor." Barack Obama--who helped win Senate approval for $3.9 billion in flu preparedness and response plans and wants Bush to appoint a flu czar "so that things like this don't slip through the cracks"--says that making the site subscription-based only is "an example of the insufficient investment" in U.S. readiness for a pandemic. Meanwhile, there are new reminders that birds--and viruses--don't respect borders...